Oddlet: Simeon Stylites · 1 min read
May 23, 2026
The Man Who Fed His Foot to Worms
What do you do when worms keep falling out of the ulcer on your foot, fifty feet above the ground, and you've been standing on a pillar for thirty-seven years?
Simeon was a Syrian shepherd's son who, around the year 423, climbed a pillar in northern Syria and stayed there for the next thirty-seven years. The final column was fifty feet high with a platform of roughly one square meter. From this perch he preached twice daily, converted whole Saracen tribes, and advised three emperors, all of whom craned their necks to listen.
He had been working up to this.
As a teenage novice he had dug a hole in the monastery garden up to his chest and stood in it for two years, summer and winter. Later he wound a rope of palm leaves around his waist so tightly that his flesh swelled over it; the disciples needed three days to extract the matted clothing from the wound. Then he nailed himself to a rock with a twenty-cubit iron chain fixed to his right foot. When a bishop ordered the chain removed, the attendants found more than twenty large bugs nesting in the leather pad. What the bishop made of this is not recorded.
Decades on the pillar produced a chronic ulcer in his left foot that suppurated for the rest of his life. Worms bred in it. They would work loose and fall from the platform to the ground below.
Simeon instructed an attendant to gather each one and put it back.
"Eat what the Lord has given you."
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- Encyclopaedia Britannica — St. Simeon Stylites — Encyclopedic summary covering birth/death dates and locations, monastic expulsion, pillar dimensions (2 m to ~15 m, ~1 sq m platform), 37 years atop the pillar, and influence on Leo I and Chalcedonian politics.
- Wikipedia — Simeon Stylites — Detailed biography with the three primary sources (Theodoret's Religious History, the disciple Antonius, and the Syriac Life), emperor interactions, the funeral by Patriarch Martyrius, and the Qal'at Sim'an complex.
- Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent) — St. Simeon Stylites the Elder — Confirms 36 years atop the pillar, death 2 September 459, first pillar 'little more than nine feet high' later 'over fifty feet,' Lenten fasting without food or drink, and dispute over relics between Antioch and Constantinople.
- Roger Pearse — Theodoret on Simeon Stylites (translation excerpts of Historia Religiosa) — Direct translated passages from Theodoret's eyewitness account: the 20-cubit iron chain, pillar heights of 6, 12, 22, and 36 cubits, the 1,244 prostrations, 40-day Lenten fasts for 28 years, and the ulcerous foot.
- Tertullian Project — Simeon Stylites, Letters (JAOS 20, 1899)
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